Announcing Xcode 7.1 Support for iOS Builds

Today, CircleCI announced full support of Xcode 7.1.1 for OS X builds.

Full support for Xcode 7.1.1 allows OS X developers using CircleCI to build and test their code for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch apps with the most current tools available. CircleCI previously supported Xcode 7.0.1.

Déjà Vu?

Some of you may have noticed that we recently released Xcode 7.1., and then rolled back. This was due to a number of issues that surfaced themselves once we started running large numbers of customer builds on the updated OS X container image. After rolling back to the previous image version, we rebuilt the update from scratch, plus designed and implemented a workflow that would not allow the issues we hit appear unnoticed in production again. We’ve been successfully working with 7.1.1 since Nov 16th, so you can build with confidence.

The Details

The support for Xcode 7.1.1 in our OS X build container is now live —we now ship Xcode 7.1.1 on the containers by default. This includes the OS X 9.1 simulator SDK, and also simulators for watchOS 2 and tvOS. Additionally, apart from Xcode 7.1.1 being added to the image, Fastlane and Carthage are now installed by default.

Previously, if OS X developers wanted to use Fastlane with CircleCI, they had to install it. Now, they can use Fastlane without any additional installation steps.

We are also showing, to some degree, confidence in the people who are developing Fastlane (now part of Fabric which is part of Twitter). We met the developer, Felix Krause, in our office during All Hands, and he will be happy to answer any questions regarding Fastlane on CircleCI Discuss.

And, xctool and Cocoapods have also been updated to the latest version, so developers will no longer have to update it manually for their Xcode 7 builds to succeed as they have had to do before.

Using the most current dev tools means more confidence in CI. More stuff preinstalled in the container means savings in build time (no need to install dependencies in every build). Adding Fastlane means more developer workflows available on CircleCI out of the box.

You can find the exact versions of the software pre-installed on the new OS X build image right here.

How to turn it on

You can select Xcode 7.1.1 for your build by adding the following to your circle.yml:

machine:
xcode:
version: "7.1"

Note: please only specify “7.1” in circle.yml as we will continue to update the 7.1 install with any bugfix releases.

Next steps

Please be reminded that we have removed the support for Xcode 6.3.1, so all the builds specifying 6.3.1 as the Xcode version in the circle.yml file will now fail with a syntax error. The new default for OS X builds will now be Xcode 6.4.

If you happen to see something unexpected happen in your OS X builds, please stop by our Discuss site where we have CircleCI employees and users who are experts in certain areas helping to investigate the issues found on our platform. Please also feel free to reach out to us by emailing sayhi@circleci.com.